Real Fakes

When we watch the Beatles Tribute band tonight in the cool blue mountains of NC, I will be paying close attention to the strumming fingers position. That is because during Asherel's work with me yesterday on my guitar, she told me I needed to see a video of myself playing. I protested, but she insisted it would be helpful. I could tell by the way she was laughing too hard to speak that there was something to be revealed on video that I was not going to like, something about how I was strumming.

I noticed a major problem immediately as she played back the video of me playing the one song I am struggling to learn.
"Some one has replaced my face," I said, "And stolen my smooth skin and stretched out my neck like an old rubberband."
The angle Asherel had chosen to video tape me was looking up from the floor, right into the wattles of my chin flapping around and the dark slits of carvernous nostrils.
"I look like a parrot," i said glumly, "Don't you think you could have found a more flattering angle?"
She studied me carefully, and then said, "No....but just focus on your hand."
"It looks like a claw," I said.
"Exactly."
"What should I do?"
"Strum with your fingers open, like this." She showed me.
"Ok, but delete that video."
"I will, later."
"No, now!"
I snatched the camera and deleted it myself with a shudder.
I just don't remember transitioning to ....this. When did all this disintegration happen?

"Try it again," said Asherel, "Keep your fingers open."
So I sang my one song and strummed with my fingers open as best I could. Asherel played back the video. The same face that had scared me on the first video still taunted me. The fingers were still clawed.
"Why don't other guitar players hands look so awful?" I asked.
"Here, maybe it is the guitar. Try mine. It is easier to play."

I know this sounds like an excuse, but honestly, my small hand doesn't easily span the fat neck of my good guitar, so I use the $10 3/4th size guitar we found in the trash. My fingers can get around the thinner neck, but the guitar is hard to play otherwise. Asherel has a good guitar, signed by John Lennon.
"Is it his real signature!?" asked her friend Josh, amazed.
"Yes," she told him, "It is a print of his real signature, so it is a fake real  signature."

There is a lot of fake realness around. The Beatles we are going to see tonight are fake real Beatles, in fact.
There are fake designer clothes and fake Rolex watches sold for $10 in NYC that are indistinguishable from the real ones. There are fake plants in our homes, and even one homeowner in a nearby neighborhood that plants fake plastic flowers around his mailbox. Most of the beautiful people in magazines have fake body parts surgically altered to perfection. The promises of the blaring commercials for total happiness if only we would just buy that are all fake, all empty, all moth wings that crumble into a puff of dust when you examine them closely.

Remember that child's story about the toy bunny that wanted to be real? He was admonished to wait....eventually, if he was loved enough, he would become real. Of course, since it is a tale meant to soothe children to sleep, he does become real in the end. I like the moral, but the story is fake. Toys don't become real no matter how much you love them. Believe me, I have tried.

The master Faker is disguised as an angel of light. He promises a world that is not his to give, and fills our hearts with deceptions and lies that ridicule the only Reality worth knowing. In Psalm 144, the psalmist recognizes that by praising the One who defeats the Faker, he can sing a new song.... a real song....an original song.....and he does so with a stringed instrument. I'll bet his fingers are not clawed as he makes the only music that lasts forever.

I looked at the video Asherel had just shot of me. I still had clawed hands, still had dripping skin, and still missed half my notes, even with the good guitar.
"It's better, said Asherel, "But maybe you should try a new song."
Maybe I should.

Psalm 144:7-9

⁷ Reach down your hand from on high;
   deliver me and rescue me
from the mighty waters,
   from the hands of foreigners
⁸ whose mouths are full of lies,
   whose right hands are deceitful.
 ⁹ I will sing a new song to you, my God;
   on the ten-stringed lyre I will make music to you,

Repeating History

"Acawwwwlllllll!"  shrieked something from overhead. We peered into the tree. Two brownish spotted huge birds perched in the limbs. They looked like a cross between a turkey and a leopard- with a wattle and multitudinous white spots.
"What is it?" asked Arvo.
"I think it is a New Guinea Hen," I answered, from the dregs of some memory I had no idea from wence it sprang....(or is it sprung)?
Anyway, we looked it up on our incredibly useful smart phone, and discovered I was correct, sort of. It was indeed a Guinea Hen.

We took a trip back in time yesterday. First we went to Old Salem, the Moravian village from the 1700s, and then we saw "1964 The Beatles Tribute" band that evening. It didn't even occur to me til I wrote that  sentence that our activities of the day all involved stepping back in history. And as we settled into our concert, the opening act was a fantastic singer from Memphis who organized his songs with a running commentary that traced the history of rock in roll. I was grateful for all the instruction in history, because if the adage is true, we are now not doomed to repeat it.

The Guinea fowl are birds that were domesticated long ago as a useful food source and predator of ticks. They are native to Africa, but adapted so well to life in the US that many people believe they are indigenous, almost immediately upon discovering what that word means. They were very common on pre-1900 farms, thus their presence in this old Moravian settlement. They taste, not surprisingly, like chicken, or snakes, which also taste like chicken. The Guineafowl mate for life, though rarely do indulge in bigamy. Most prefer monogamy because they can't afford the prison time if caught with two hen spouses, and for sure the Moravians frowned upon it.

We sat and watched the Guineafowl for quite some time as our feet were tired from trodding across Old Salem. Then, in tribute to the Beatles Tribute we were about to see, we had fish and chips for dinner. Asherel would have fish and chips for every meal if we would allow it, and is investigating majoring in Beatles Studies at the university in Liverpool. This evening was a dream come true for her.

The colliseum was awash in people my age, and older. All the old hippies who survived were there. And all of them were singing along, twisting and shouting. The Beatles imitators themselves were remarkably Beatle like, with every nuance of the way the Beatles moved, held their guitars, danced, and even shook their hair.....until we got up close to the stage, which we did for the encore.

Up close, we saw that the Beatles had aged considerably....and the hair had to be wigs, or at best dyed. However, they were very talented, and we had a wonderful time reliving years that I hadn't fully lived the first time around. I really wish I had paid attention to the Beatles when they were alive. Now that they are dead, I want to be a groupie. Asherel, who is a natural musician, loves them and understands the genius of their music, something that eluded me when I was growing up and the world was gaga over them. I preferred to sit in willow trees , and eat apples and read books about guineafowl.

In front of the colliseum where the Beatles Tribute performed, were row after row of posts with the names of all the US wars on one side, and the fallen soldiers from the community on the other. I thought of Comer, my old friend and WW2 veteran who was 93 years old. The personal history of our country is slowly dying off. Recently the last WW1 soldier died. The oldest man on earth just died, and with him, the personal recollections of his grandfather who used to talk with him about his experiences as a soldier for the Union Army in the Civil war. Arvo and I shook our heads sadly thinking this powerful, shaping history of our nation was disappearing and no one seems to care much to remember it.
"We have new history now," comforted Asherel.
And yet, she stood there with the old folk with her fresh unwrinkled brow, twisting and shouting with the echoes of time marching past. I listened and sang too, with visions of soldiers from the past and of a lonely single pair of Guinea fowl nesting in a tree that had first budded on a new country.

And how fitting that we start this week remembering, this week that culminates in remembrance of a very ancient occurrence. It is the single most rocking occurrence of all time, and I don't mean the Beatles. It is the single most pivotal event of history- the death of a Man that claimed to be the savior of the world, and His resurrection. The tribute band playing His song will be strumming harps and lyres and they will not need to worry about wigs or makeup.  And as Asherel noted in a slightly different context, the old will be made new.

2 Corinthians 5: 7-8, 17-18

⁷ Get rid of the old yeast, so that you may be a new unleavened batch—as you really are. For Christ, our Passover lamb, has been sacrificed. ⁸ Therefore let us keep the Festival, not with the old bread leavened with malice and wickedness, but with the unleavened bread of sincerity and truth.

¹⁷ Therefore, if anyone is in Christ, the new creation has come: The old has gone, the new is here! ¹⁸ All this is from God, who reconciled us to himself through Christ